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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29766750">Rights</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone'>standalone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Cold, F/M, First Time, Sex, Wedding Night, everyone is happy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 00:34:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,592</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29766750</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A small almost-epilogue.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Miryem Mandelstam/The Staryk Lord</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>82</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Rights</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is in no way a fix-it, only a tiny augmentation for those who, like me, finished <em>Spinning Silver</em> and, once they'd regained control of their heart and breathing, found themselves still longing for a little bit of Staryk sex.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It's a good thing we made the time short. Every shared moment, now that I knew to look for it, I felt his eyes on me, their cold reckoning a whisper over my skin.</p><p>The cold had long since lost its power to bring me pain. It was my constant atmosphere, and even in extremity, could only bring sensation; but to call it <em>only</em> felt deceptive in its understatement, as if to say a plummet that breaks no bones has been <em>only </em>unsettling, or a journey that has haphazardly flung a person across worlds and dragged whirlpools in the flow of time has been only eye-opening. </p><p>Before the engagement, we touched rarely; so little with the Staryk is accidental or unplanned, and every self is a single pin bound by long winding threads of obligation and responsibility to every other, so one holds one’s space and avoids bumps.</p><p>After the engagement, he came to me at the little house several times, and we walked in the woods, and I held his hand. Then, the whispers of cold became a roar, rushing through the long bones of my fingers and the round ones of my wrist, and I did not look away for even an instant from his gaze that went sharp on me like wind that has traveled a long way over ice before it streaks around you and sets your teeth chattering and steals your breath.</p><p>Even after months and months, two weeks is a long time to wait when you know what it is you want. </p><p>“I want to kiss you,” I told him. Four days remained till the wedding. “What will you have in return?”</p><p>He took my hand then and pressed it to his lowered face, his lips lingering so that the chill of him crept up my arm and made me tremble. </p><p>“Not like that,” I said, the soft fall of his long braids an irresistible spectacle from which I could not pull my attention with anything but indignation. “And anyway, how is this not a bargainable proposition? Oh, don’t tell me. It’s another matter of rights, I imagine; it is to be <em>expected</em>, of course, that a lord may kiss upon the hand his betrothed, as one person married may lie with the other.” He straightened and laughed. “But then, ought I to have been bargaining <em>away</em> my kisses these last days? For I have had too few.”</p><p>“I do not know the ways of your people,” the Staryk said. “In my world, some parts of marriage go beyond negotiation. We will owe each other happiness that cannot be counted or brokered.” When he said “<em>we will,</em>” I felt the cold promise of it tingling in my core—enough almost to distract me from my purpose.</p><p>“Are you saying no?” I lifted my hands to his hair and he looked down at me looking up at him, shaking my head in dismay. “You told me you would exercise your <em>rights </em>with me, and now you won’t even—”</p><p>The cold of his mouth on mine was like plunging my arms and face into the river at late autumn, startling every part of me alive—an intensity that makes regular life feel distinctly, only, <em>regular. </em>My fingers were wound in his braids and when he pulled back, it was not far, and he breathed out a crackling breath that froze the air between us so that it was almost as if I was kissing him still. </p><p>“I have no wish to deny you,” he said from that little distance. “But you must tell me what you want.”</p><p>The next time I saw him, I kissed him many times. I developed no immunity to the sudden shock of cold; only a little jangling awareness of what to expect, at once calming and maddening. </p><p>The time after that was our wedding day, and there was no time for us to be alone.</p><p>The guests arrived a night early, that they might have time to fill their eyes of me before I left again for the mountain—for the next day’s time, we knew, would vanish like the grasses in a light spring snow, seemingly abundant even as the flakes drifted down upon them, until you blinked and all were gone. The Staryk king would make the day as mild as he could, because his people could not enter the warm little house, so all would take place out of doors, in the clearing between Stepon’s mother’s tree and the pines.</p><p>My grandmother conveyed to us, along with the mirror, a letter from the tsarina, who promised a visit once her morning-sickness improved. Ever canny, Irina could not have overlooked the tactical benefits of alliance. Strategy need not displace friendship, however; we would welcome her when she came, and I would be glad of her knowledge like a fathomless well, even its highest reaches a distant shimmer and its depths placid and rockbound and unknowable. </p><p>The tsar, too, had penned a note of congratulations and enclosed a gift that was no less startling than it was gratifying: a small portrait of the two of us, an incredible likeness, except that he had never known me or my Staryk to smile—yet he showed us only serious, not dour, and the pattern sketched around us was like the frost on a midwinter windowpane.</p><p>The little house was beautiful and festive. Under my mother’s direction, Wanda and I had baked and cooked every wedding dish she knew, and Stepon gathered mushrooms and Sergey brought in a deer, nearly all white but for the spots like a flower’s fallen petals on one shoulder, so we had city food and forest food, and Flek and Tsop arrived laden with platters of Staryk fish and fruit and a tureen of cold wedding soup to be served in bowls made of pine sprigs embedded in clear ice. </p><p>We ate and we drank and danced under the bright black of a winter sky, for no snow fell today and the white trees reached up glad into the dark above and surrounded by celebration, my Staryk held me by the hand, and I him.</p><p>Then we were flying over the distance in the sleigh, rushing up and around the curving passageways of the mountain, and delivered into the circle of white trees, where our people waited, for the second time, to greet me as their queen.</p><p>This time was nicer.</p><p>I led the way to my rooms with a heart full of the goodwill of the Staryk people and, crinkling in the back of my mind, a few more questions about the nature of communal responsibility, because for every kindness I had shown them, so had I been fed and taught and helped, and mostly without any pact that I knew of.</p><p>When we had dismissed the servants, I pulled aside the filmy screen that hid my bedroom—a deep alcove outfitted with a dressing-table and a low bench, and of course the bed with its silk covers cool and light as breezes. Then I let the cloth swish back down, for the first time alone with him in my private chamber.</p><p>He looked at me in my finery and I looked at him in his, and I could wait no longer.</p><p>“Undress,” I ordered him. “Show me yourself.”</p><p>“You have not inquired about the limits of your rights,” he observed.</p><p>“This is not a question of rights,” I said. “I have married you, and I wish to see you, and if you wish the same, you will undress, and if you do not wish, I am certain you will make no secret of it.”</p><p>In his nakedness, he seemed to me taller, though of course I was the one who had grown in our time together. The hard, severe lines of his body were no less severe than ever, except now my mind had divorced severity from cruelty, so I saw instead the stillness of anxiety because he was anxious, watching my eyes watch his ice-pale body and hoping— what? </p><p>Hoping that I would find the bargain satisfactory.</p><p>He saw my glance assess his sharp places—the shoulders, the jutting wrists—and the icy plains of bicep and chest and thigh, and settle on his abdomen, below which, like a melting icicle a sharp-edged arc curved down, bitingly white traced with blue.</p><p>Looking back at his face, I let my eyes widen dramatically—a joke, and a question.</p><p>“I have said, lady,” he said, and here he moved enough to take a small step toward me, “I will cause you no harm.”</p><p>I laughed—not at his intention, but at the physical facts of the situation, the earth-rending, winter-bringing force of him and his jagged edges and, funnier still, that I knew the laughter would bewilder and concern him, but that he would not take personal offense.</p><p>He shook his head minutely, a long thin braid shifting forward over his shoulder. “Staryk and humans have done so before.”</p><p>“Not like this.”</p><p>“If you will place your hands upon me,” he said, mouth curving to find himself bargaining even now, “I will show you.”</p><p>When I touched him, I expected that he would become even more still than before. He would not want me to doubt his control or his honor. The blue color deepened with my touch, the color of a river that rushes below its impenetrable surface of winter ice, and as the color flooded toward my hands, he filled and grew until the sharpness was gone and he was firm and curved and smooth. Below the surface of the end, heavy in my palm, the blue-white pulses glinted outward at angles, as if he was faceted inside like a jeweler’s rounded diamond.</p><p>But he was not still. His fingers lifted to tilt my face toward his again, and he asked, in a voice trying hard to keep steady, if my mind was now at ease.</p><p>I squeezed for the satisfaction of the sigh he let out, a creaking rush of air through trees. I could not imagine admitting all of him into me—and yet I wanted it. Of this, I was certain. My jawbone tingled under his touch, but I felt it too in my booted toes, in my tumbling stomach, below my skirts. </p><p>“At ease? No.” He would not accept an elision of the question, I knew, so I had to answer even though the answer pushed him back three steps. “But I am ready for you.” </p><p>His shoulders softened a little, their points no less sharp but less foreboding. It was hard to remember fearing him. He looked like he wanted to reach for me, but he hesitated.</p><p>“Do you wish to begin a child?” he asked. </p><p>“Yes,” I said, “but not this night.” It had not occurred to me that I might have any say in the matter. I was not Irina, queen of a shiftless realm of treachery in which a child was essential to security; if it were up to me—which, I realized for the first time, it might actually be, and I let my mind spin out for the second the long even strands of possibility—I would rather have quite a few nights before I began the march toward motherhood.</p><p>“Then, this night, you will not say my name.” The sternness of the warning offended me at first because I had not considered that I would ever have occasion to do so, and was hurt to find his opinion of my discretion so low; then I thought of what he had said about the incalculable debts of marriage and saw that he was not doubting me, but trusting me—trusting me doubly with the name that he had willingly given in trade for my hand. “When you are ready,” he said, voice low, the hush of a winter forest where life grows quietly in hibernation, “call me to you with the true name that only you know, and you will have of me all that you wish.”</p><p>“What if <em>you </em>don’t want it?” I asked.</p><p>“Do you question my desire for progeny?”</p><p>I laughed. “I do.”</p><p>“I wish to have children with you, my queen.” He looked actually hurt, and though I was still smiling at the puzzle of imagining him as a father, I lifted my hand to my heart in apology. I still did not understand very well how to express regret here. “When you are ready, I will be ready.”</p><p>“What if I want you, but not to get children?”</p><p>“Then call me to you.”</p><p>“You wouldn’t have told me your name before.”</p><p>“It was not part of the agreement.” Even now, naked and aroused, to speak of a contract made him draw up in tidily self-contained pride. The gleaming lines of his body seemed lighted from within, like moonstone, not reflective but luminous.</p><p>“I didn’t even know I had the right to bargain. You made me a deal in which my only alternative was death!” He did not duck at this; but he seemed to narrow. “But alive,” I continued, shaking my head at him, “had I had my rights of you, I would not have borne you children.”</p><p>“The probability is low,” he said. “Not impossible. In the presence of great enough magic, the crevices widen between what <em>might be </em>and what <em>is</em>. I owed you only the act and the chance.”</p><p>“It was a bad deal.”</p><p>“It was falsely made,” he agreed, and I saw that this was as good as I could hope. He had conveyed already in the convoluted, declarative language of his people that he treasured me, that he valued me, that he had wronged me—and I had exulted to accept the hand he, the second time, gladly and humbly offered. I didn’t want to squabble.</p><p>Tucking his true name safe into a cranny of my mind, as a squirrel stores a nut for a later day, I said, “Come here,” and he did.</p><p>I let him unbutton and untie and unlace my wedding clothes. The fine wool dress with its hems embroidered in silver and gold flowers came away first, then the silken sleeves, and the light, pointed boots, and last the petticoats and underwear, and his careful fingertips ran across bare skin.</p><p>Then he became less careful. His mouth, smooth and cold as river stones, traversed my shoulders as his hands wrapped around my sides and he lifted me, gasping with the influx of cold, and brought us to my bed.</p><p>Frigid above me, he caressed my face and shoulder, let his fingers dust the length of my arm. His touch tingled and I thought of the frost that blooms beneath him, spreading over my skin so that I felt him everywhere, icy and sure.</p><p>“Closer,” I said, and when it still was not enough, I caught his wrists in my hands and settled his body atop mine. I felt the wintry press of his hipbones and his stomach, and the sides of his legs, and the shocking delicate bones of his ice-carved feet, and most of all, of the nudge of him between my legs. With my eyes open, saying what my voice could not, I slid my hands down the long gelid expanse of his body and <em>pulled</em>. </p><p>He moved into me—or I moved around him, it was impossible to tell—slowly, a fusing of light and sound and climate, the world around me groaning with the expansion, and falling away because nothing could be colder than the cold at my center, the cold of the Staryk inside me, now, and vibrating with the cold, with the effort of restraining the numberless winters he held. </p><p>A sound escaped my throat; the fullness was overwhelming. I was an icy river overflowing its banks. </p><p>He looked acutely down at me. “You will tell me if you are in pain,” he said. </p><p>I couldn’t speak, but I nodded. In and around and above me, the Staryk went immobile and his eyes grew sharper still.</p><p>Taking a few breaths till I could make myself form words, I laughed a little, shallowly, because it felt, connected to him, as though my lungs and heart and inner organs were all compressed, too occupied with feeling to fully attend to their regular work. “That’s not what I meant. I <em>will </em>tell you. If it hurts.”</p><p>It didn’t hurt. Without the cold, it might have; I had never held a person inside me, and it seemed that such an incursion must bruise—but I felt only that I was adjusting to a new state of being, as if my flesh and sinews and arching bones had turned crystalline as the walls of my chamber, not transparent, but sufficiently translucent to show all my selves inside. A daughter, a moneylender, a sister, a Staryk queen... </p><p>I had never been unloved, but oh, I had wanted. Desperately, I had demanded the food and security and comfort and respect; now, with all these my own, I wanted for nothing. I had a family whose home would always stand lighted and welcome, even in the deepest winter nights; I had wealth beyond measure; dear friends; a kingdom; a king. His shoulder blades were singing iron under my fingers. I could feel him tremble extended above me, waiting still for my direction. I pulled him down to meet me, and with a snapped-off exhalation, he pressed all the way against me.</p><p>I wrapped myself around him, experimenting, so that my thighs made brackets around his and my ankles hooked behind his knees, and with more of a thought than a movement, rolled us across the silver silk till I was atop him and he was gazing up at me in awe, his braids the loose-flung rays of a wavering star.</p><p>From here the fullness was so great that I needed to shift. Rising to my knees, I adjusted, the cold of him licking long blue ribbons within me as I rose, then sank tentatively back down. “Ha!” I gasped in surprised delight, because the renewed vigor of the cold made my soft parts tighten and my solid parts melt. So strong he was, this king of winter. </p><p>My hair curtained us as I leaned forward to place my lips on his sharp-angled face. “I have bargained well,” I whispered into the shimmering skin before his ear, and I took his hands and set them on my hips so that he would know the tensing muscles that made me rise and fall.</p><p>The more I moved around him, the stiller my own mind grew, the eternal chatter of thought quieting to a bare whisper as he gripped my churning hips and stared into my frenzied eyes, where I was seeing, through and around him, vast snowfields and proud, broad-horned deer, and white falling feather-soft all around.</p><p>I wondered if he saw—or perhaps felt? my senses swirled through each other, indistinct and blizzard-beautiful—the same things I did.</p><p>I cried out once, twice, and then I was sure that what he saw and felt was not the same, because holding me to him and propelling upward into me to fill me again and again as I felt a third cry swell inside me and splinter through my entire body, blue sparks of it shooting down my legs and arms and illuminating suddenly the overpowered lungs and bidding them to draw deep, he croaked, “Thrice proven,” and with his voice the bed shook, and I saw that his thoughts had not been on snowscapes and starless nights, but of me. He thrust up, and up. “Thrice proved.”</p><p>Because they were knotted together into that speck of time, I can’t say if the shattering, glittering mosaic of light that subsumed me came from his words or the unyielding clench of him around and inside me or the knowledge, in that moment, that these were my rights, and his: to bring each other joy.</p><p>I heard my shout refract from the clear-hewn walls. </p><p>Jagged points stretched his face, and as he thrust inside me, he let out an otherworldly moan. Without my needing to do a thing, my body contracted tight around his pulsing. A new chill shot through me. I had known so many kinds of cold here, yet this was the coldest still; gems radiating pure white light that surged through every crevice and turned my cries to piercing gasps, fingers frost-rimed and chest pounding with heat, stoked like a snowed-in forge.</p><p>We needed time to breathe. I laid my fiery face to his cheek and felt the cool seep in.</p><p>As I rested upon the glassy swell of his body, rising and falling with his arctic respiration, a thought occurred to me. I rolled to lie beside him and took his hand in mine.</p><p>“Where does a Staryk king sleep?” I had never seen his rooms. I assumed he <em>had</em> rooms. </p><p>He laughed soft and deep, like a wind in distant chimes. “If I may,” he said, muffled voice at odds with the cold that pumped through him so that where he held my hand, I felt his wrist through my own, “what offer would entice you to trade away the privacy of your night's repose?”</p><p>“Don’t let go,” I said. “Not till I fall asleep.”</p><p>“I agree to it,” he murmured, and the ice of his touch flickered idly, constant and welcome as love, in my veins as peace gradually overtook us, until we slept. </p>
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